


Permanent melody

by tsukiakari



Series: Insomnia [5]
Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games), Nancy Drew – HER Interactive (Video Games)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukiakari/pseuds/tsukiakari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wade and Savannah start to work things out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permanent melody

**Author's Note:**

> Back to 2013. This takes place immediately after "Reversing blackout".

By the time the sun's set, it's as though the years between them have been compressed into a day. Her house is cramped and tiny, each room permeated with an odd feeling of abandonment and the lonely's relief at a presence, welcoming in the same way as her awkward first embrace. As the last evening light fades off the sky's mirror, they sit in the living room and watch it vanish.

"You sure there's nothing else to fill me in on?" she asks after a few minutes, hesitation bleeding into her voice.

He smiles despite himself and glances over, weighing the idea of moving closer to her. She's wrapped her arms around herself, messy braid draped over her shoulder, looking as beautiful and appealing as she's ever been before. Somehow, for all that, the vulnerability written across her posture makes him disregard the idea and he bites his lip instead. "Trust me, my life's substantially more boring than yours."

Her laugh is still the same, wry and light with that edge of forced carelessness. "You might wanna rethink that...for your information, I've just been waltzing from town to town all this time, like the girl with the red shoes. Not only that, but you've got..."

The silence stifles her words like a hasty physical presence, and a glance at her reveals a heavy glow of red over her cheekbones. It's easy for him to remember, even now - what he'd said that evening, the night it'd led into, a dark moonlit one nervously similar to the one creeping over the neighborhood even now. The old anxiety starts tainting his thoughts, strong as it was on the trip there.

He hears her take a breath to speak and cuts her off, not even sure what he's saying. "Look, it's okay, don't worry about it. Lots of stuff's changed with my family since then."

She looks at him with an expression more eloquent than any words, brimming with doubt and painful distrust. It hurts and he wants to deny it, to clean it up quickly with hasty blame.

"I'm not going back," is all he can think of to say.

Her eyes narrow and she leans toward him, just a bit, enough to draw him toward her in turn. "Hey, you don't mean that." For a minute something passes across her face, something he only knows as faint sadness. "You wanna know how many times you said that to me back in Brunswick?"

The first thing coming to his mind is scathing and he bites back the words, turning them over, softening them mentally. "A hundred times, sure...and then you'd go to work at that library and meet me at the bar every evening."

She laughs again, this time a snort of real amusement. "Don't go trying to flatter me, 'cause it ain't gonna work."

Suddenly he wants to kiss her, and it takes a moment to push the urge away. "Hey, I'm being honest. Why would I try after all this time?" he says when his voice returns, trying for her brand of forced casualness.

"You mean to tell me that you stayed in that silly little town for my sake, that you'd've driven to Canada in five minutes' time if I'd wanted to go with you?" Her voice is abruptly serious. "Now I think you're just trying to guilt-trip me."

"Van..." Her old nickname slips out before he can catch it and she blanches at the sound of it. A silence goes by, nearly like an intermission, before color fades into her cheeks again.

He doesn't trust himself to use her full name, and cuts it out altogether. "Look, I...don't want to start quibbling about what we did in the past. Right now I'm gonna say that what put me in jail was a mistake, and I've paid off that debt, with interest." Her old comment comes back to his memory, making him almost smile. "You said back then that we should've left...hey, you were right. But the last thing I wanna do is dwell on it."

Her eyes flicker over his face, wide and bright, the streetlamps outside reflected as dots of golden light. "I was scared," she whispers. "I'm not going through that again. It's been bad enough since."

There's nothing he can say to that, and he doesn't even try. The years he's spent clutching at scraps of her life, calling in old favors and taking new ones just to find out where she'd been the month before - it's barely enough to understand how she could have felt and it does nothing to help him understand the reality of it.

"You won't." He keeps his gaze locked on hers, half-trapped in it. "I'm not going back."

A smile flashes across her mouth, so quickly that it barely seems to exist. "You prove that to me and I'll forget you tried that flattery."

"You bet I will." Now he can't help grinning. Her vulnerability's all but gone and it makes him reach out, taking hold of her chin with one hand. "May I?"

"You may." She smiles again, the real warmth of it spreading slowly over her face like some sort of sunrise, for all that the very thought's a cliche to him. He ignores the foolish background romanticism and the curtains open to the night, and kisses her.

For the rest of the evening they sit on the couch watching the dim shapes of cars go by, and she leans against his shoulder.


End file.
